In recent years, ride-on steerable snow sleds employing generally three runners, two for support and one for steering, have become popular. These permit the operator to steer around other sledders or obstacles on a hill. The sleds are particularly popular with people who are unable to master the art of snow skiing.
A typical three-runnered steerable ride-on snow sled is disclosed and claimed in Canadian Patent 1,037,529 to Odd. These known snow sleds, however, suffer one major difficulty, in that the side or support runners are fixedly attached to the frame and thus, lack the edging effect present in conventional skiing. Therefore, traversing a hill, particularly in icy conditions is very difficult, if not impossible. Furthermore, because the edging effect is not present, the sled can easily overturn. In fact, in icy conditions, even when the sled is directed in a downhill direction, the steerable front runner is not sufficient to produce the desired turn.
This problem of lack of edging or weighting of one ski over the other in ski sleds is known. The problem has attempted to be overcome by fairly complex pivotal support skis which function by means of parallelogram or other type linkages, which are manipulated by the operator. One such device is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,398,970--Kotaro Horiuchi. Similarly, in Canadian Patent 1,130,843, a sled having tiltable runners and runners which are adapted to move one ahead of the other, is disclosed and claimed.
These sleds, however, are complicated, cumbersome, expensive to manufacture, and difficult to manipulate by the novice .
Therefore, it is an object of the present invention to provide an inexpensive simple functioning steerable ride-on snow sled which is adapted to edge into a hill and traverse without sliding by the operator varying his weight on the support skis.
It is a further object of the invention to produce a durable inexpensive steerable snow sled that can be quickly and easily manipulated by the novice operator.